Cloud storage is strategically inevitable

Cloud storage is

strategically inevitable

IBM can help in preparing for a successful cloud

storage deployment

Highlights

●● ● ●Use cloud technology to enable speed

and innovation by empowering users and communities to define, create and collaborate on new offerings and services, as well as improve business agility

●● ● ●Successfully deploy cloud storage

using essential IBM technologies

●● ● ●Cultivate and exploit open standards to

achieve an enduring approach to cloud

Economic pressures continue to drive much of the IT agenda while, at the same time, executives are demanding that IT incorporate new and innovative technologies to drive growth and innovation. Social, mobile and big data analytics capabilities are reshaping interactions between customers, employees, vendors and business partners, enabling new revenue opportunities for enterprises while at the same time creating unprecedented data growth challenges.

In order to take advantage of these capabilities, the enterprise needs a robust and flexible storage infrastructure. And many organizations are looking at the cloud as a way to deliver storage services more quickly and efficiently. Cloud adoption is skyrocketing. Some IT managers are choos-ing to build private clouds themselves. Some are chooschoos-ing to have service providers host clouds for them. Some are choosing to rent cloud services from public cloud providers. And, increasingly, there are hybrid imple-mentations. One thing is certain—it is hard to find an IT manager today who is not dealing with the cloud.

Cloud enables speed, agility and

innovation

The cloud can help IT organizations and businesses create and deliver value in new ways:

For IT organizations, the cloud facilitates better cooperation by enabling new processes that break down traditional silos and simplify access to information. With cloud, IT can:

●● ●Deliver faster and higher-quality services globally ●● ●Integrate services across environments

●● ●Utilize IT resources more effectively

For business users, the cloud supports innovation by empower-ing internal and external communities to define, create and col-laborate on new offerings and services, and to improve business agility. With cloud, businesses can:

●● ●Establish new revenue streams

●● ●Drive faster time to market for new services

●● ●Meet customer expectations (wherever they are) by providing

fast access to information (wherever it may be located)

●● ●Become more competitive in the marketplace

The true promise of cloud isn’t just about speeding service,

The time has come to meet user needs with the cloud

Developers

CFO, CEO

Line of business

Employees

“Provide me the testing platform now.˝

“Safeguard my data.˝ “Reduce cost, use what you have, comply with regulations.˝

“IT is not fast enough to support my strategy and is slowing down innovation.˝

“I need to react quickly to market demand.˝

IT professionals

“I need to share and collaborate.˝

Storage cloud

Storage as a Service Use cases:

File store and share Archive Backup • • • • • •

Compute cloud

Private clouds Public clouds

What cloud means to storage

In this new era of IT, workloads will operate on virtual, cloud-based compute infrastructure for functions such as development and testing, website hosting and seasonal compute needs. The data that those workloads operate on will live in virtual, cloud-based storage capacity. Enterprises will need to store large amounts of content, whether for sharing with colleagues, for archiving to use later or for backup in case of data loss. Whichever form of cloud proves best for their environment— from building internal private cloud services to running services on managed or hosted clouds to a hybrid approach that com-bines both—enterprises can access the benefits of the cloud. To make benefits possible in the storage arena, a certain set of enabling capabilities must come together. Users will want self-service access to storage capacity on demand—and they’ll want to be able to get that access from anywhere. At the same time,

the IT managers who are housing the data will want to be hyper efficient not only in how they store data, but in how they manage the infrastructure. And they will want to charge back, or at least show back, costs so consumers will be aware of the effect their requests and decisions have on the cost to the business.

When organizations realize improvement in these three areas, the results can be dramatic, as this value-delivery chart compar-ing traditional and cloud storage demonstrates:

Value delivered to end user

Traditional Cloud Storage provisioning Weeks/hours Minutes Continuous access

to data

Centralized Localized (anytime, anywhere)

What users want, what cloud infrastructure should deliver

User

Self-service

Access from anywhere

On-demand capacity Protection Efficiency / utilization Optimized management Metering / chargeback Security / compliance

Infrastructure

Common goal: Open-cloud architecture

The IBM perspective on building cloud capabilities is that the only enduring approach will be through the cultivation and exploitation of open standards. Without an open-standards approach, clients can be pigeon-holed into islands of proprie-tary point solutions that don’t interoperate over the long term. That’s why IBM is investing significant effort in forming, spon-soring and supporting open-source solutions:

●● ●As a founding member of the 400-member Cloud Standards

Customer Council

●● ●As an OpenStack Platinum Sponsor and one of the top

con-tributors to the open-source OpenStack code base

●● ●By dedicating more than 500 developers to open-cloud

projects

●● ●By working closely with the OpenStack Foundation, with its

8,600+ members from 87 countries and 179 companies

industry-leading storage features accessible through OpenStack. All of the advanced features of Storwize family systems, such as IBM Easy Tier® and IBM Real-time Compression™, are read-ily accessible via standard OpenStack mechanisms, as is the ease of use of XIV. In the upcoming release of OpenStack (Havana), only the Storwize driver provides storage-based volume migra-tion. Storwize system-driven volume migration enables users to leverage storage system performance rather than relying on server cycles and network bandwidth to do the work.

The path to success

cloud-ready storage systems must provide automated data tier-ing for speed and cost savtier-ings. The architecture should allow transparent centralization of data and migration from older systems. Self-service provisioning with automated metering, reporting and billing capabilities that benefit all users are a must in any cloud deployment. An end user should be able to carry out simple requests, such as for storage capacity, quickly and without involving IT staff. And cloud storage systems should be able to quickly adapt and leverage industry-standard tools and protocols for portability, expandability and quick deployment. IBM offers essential storage technologies to enable successful cloud storage deployments, including:

●● ●Storage virtualization, which enables automated

provision-ing and online quality-of-service tunprovision-ing without disruptprovision-ing users or applications

●● ●Thin provisioning, which eliminates the need to pre-

allocate storage, so that costs can match the pay-per-use payment model

●● ●Scale-out performance and capacity, which allows

performance to scale linearly with added capacity for predict-able performance for any workload, at any time

●● ●Self-tuning, self-healing grid architecture, which ensures

optimal performance under unpredictable conditions

●● ●IBM Hyper-Scale Manager, which enables storage to grow

into petabytes without adding complexity

●● ●Easy Tier automated tiering, which maintains performance

levels without manual storage tuning

●● ●Real-time Compression, which increases usable storage

capacity up to five times without impacting application performance2

●● ●IBM Active Cloud Engine™, which gives IT administrators

the ability to manage files efficiently, whether they are in a single data center or dispersed throughout multiple data centers across geographic locations

●● ●Tiered Storage Optimizer, which uses analytics-driven data

management, automation and the IBM storage virtualization platform to periodically balance storage workloads for effi-ciency and performance

●● ●User self-service provisioning, which enables access to

IBM provides industry-leading storage systems that are inherently virtualized.

XIV Storage System is an ideal storage solution for large-scale cloud deployments, delivering predictable and consistent per-formance for unpredictable workloads due to its self-tuning, self-optimizing grid architecture. Its design is unique in that it requires virtually no effort to manage, provision and optimize storage. Along with many other IBM storage products, XIV Storage System is designed to seamlessly integrate into popular cloud environments, such as OpenStack or VMware vCloud. Just like XIV, the Storwize family of virtualized storage systems easily complements virtualized server environments. Each Storwize solution is designed with simplicity and cost-effectiveness in mind, delivering intuitive management, scalable capacity and high availability. These systems offer industry-leading efficiency and flexibility through built-in flash storage optimization, Real-time Compression and thin provisioning. IBM Scale Out Network Attached Storage (SONAS) is an ideal solution for file stores and content repositories with its ultra-high petabyte-level scalability. At the core of SONAS is Active Cloud Engine, which enables collaboration among users around the globe, distributes files to multiple locations quickly and localizes data to reduce network costs.

IBM SmartCloud Storage Access complements XIV, Storwize family and SONAS storage systems to provide self-service storage capacity provisioning, monitoring and reporting. This intuitive, easy-to-use software gives users and on-demand applications greater agility and rapid access to storage capacity. Automated metering and billing associated with pay per use are also possible using an accounting or billing application, such as IBM SmartCloud Cost Management.

industry-infrastructures. Innovative technology, open standards, excellent performance, and a broad portfolio of proven storage software, hardware and solutions offerings are just a few of the reasons to consider storage solutions from IBM. In addition, IBM pro-vides a single source for comprehensive, well-integrated yet flexible cloud solutions—so organizations do not have to worry about the complexities of dealing with different hardware and software vendors.

Global IBM scalability and reach allows organizations to cost-effectively leverage IBM expertise worldwide. Eighty percent of Fortune 500 companies use IBM cloud capabilities. And IBM continues to integrate cloud technologies into its own business, improving how products work in concert, from both technology and business perspectives. IBM has an extraordinary track record when it comes to making technology work and working with organizations to achieve an outstanding return on investment.

For more information

To learn more about IBM solutions for a successful cloud storage deployment, contact your IBM representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit:

ibm.com/systems/storage/solutions/cloud/index.html

© Copyright IBM Corporation 2013

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Produced in the United States of America October 2013

IBM, the IBM logo, ibm.com, System Storage, IBM SmartCloud, Storwize, XIV, and EasyTier are trademarks of International Business Machines Corp., registered in many jurisdictions worldwide. Other product and service names might be trademarks of IBM or other companies. A current list of IBM trademarks is available on the web at “Copyright and trademark information” at ibm.com/legal/copytrade.shtml

This document is current as of the initial date of publication and may be changed by IBM at any time. Not all offerings are available in every country in which IBM operates.

THE INFORMATION IN THIS DOCUMENT IS PROVIDED “AS IS” WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING WITHOUT ANY WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND ANY WARRANTY OR CONDITION OF NON-INFRINGEMENT. IBM products are warranted according to the terms and conditions of the agreements under which they are provided. Actual available storage capacity may be reported for both uncompressed and compressed data and will vary and may be less than stated.

1_{Saul J. Berman, Anthony Marshall and Rohini Srivathsa, “The power of}

cloud: Driving business model innovation,” IBM Institute for Business Value, February 2012. http://www.ibm.com/common/ssi/cgi-bin/ssialias?subtype= XB&infotype=PM&appname=GBSE_GB_TI_USEN&htmlfid=GBE03470USEN& attachment=GBE03470USEN.PDF

2_{IBM lab measurements – April 2012.}